Discovering the adversary, one day at a time

July 06, 2012

The Brotherhood's Bi-Annual Review

I tweeted this last week, but I forgot to post it to the blog. Consider it a curio from a different time. It's an English-language periodical, published in 1990 through a Cairo-based Muslim Brotherhood publishing house - Ummah Press Service. The Library of Congress record is here.

There are no bombshells in this document, but if you're an observer of the Egyptian Brotherhood - and you're reading about this for the first time - you may find this artifact something of interest. It, along with other English language Ummah Press Service publications, suggest that the editors had a Western audience in mind. It begs the question: whose ambition was it to reach an English-reading audience, and for what purpose?

Back in 2007, I posted on another Ummah Press Service publication, The West in the Eyes of the Egyptian Islamic Movement. That document (a copy of my original file can found here) was a discussion of the political distinctions and means of action between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian jihadi groups of the period, Jihad and Islamic Group.

The periodical linked here was part of an ambitious experiment to construct an English-language identity for the group. The experiment failed. There's little in the LC records to show that Ummah Press regularly produced English language material after the early 1990s. Perhaps this is what makes the Biannual Review so interesting. So little English-language scholarship about the Brotherhood exists from this time period. Of the 19 records drawn from the LC catalog, only one is in English. As a result, this tiny collection of English-language works, published in earnest by the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1990s, may be the only extant English-language primary source material of the period available for further scholarly study of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.